11 New Books We Recommend This Week
Feb. 11, 2021
Crime and punishment make their presence felt in this week’s recommended titles, from Russell Shorto’s family history of his grandfather’s mob ties (“Smalltime”) to Philippe Sands’s account of a Nazi fugitive (“The Ratline”); Maurice Chammah’s study of the death penalty and its decline (“Let the Lord Sort Them”) to Reuben Jonathan Miller’s look at the life that awaits ex-inmates (“Halfway Home”).
Also on our night stands this week: Ethan Zuckerman’s new book about the collapse of institutional authority (“Mistrust”), Emily Rapp Black’s memoir of motherhood and grief (“Sanctuary”), Jeremy Atherton Lin’s personal and cultural history (“Gay Bar”) and Avi Loeb’s argument that aliens visited the neighborhood in 2017 (“Extraterrestrial”). Finally, there’s Thomas Healy’s “Soul City,” about one man’s attempt to create a Black-run city in the 1970s; Charles Wheelan’s “We Came
Meet a Family Who Spent 9 Months Traveling the Globe, Pre-Plague
The Wheelan family struck a pose on the Bolivian salt flats.Credit.via Charles Wheelan
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By Amity Gaige
A Family Gap Year
By Charles Wheelan
I go through phases: Sometimes I feel as if I’m doing OK as a parent, other times I feel like a henchwoman in one long, slow sociocultural crime. When my 15-year-old son screams for help from his counterterrorism team while shooting his way around the world in Rainbow Six Siege, I consider turning myself in to the authorities.
In the fall of 2016, faced with related, albeit more charitable feelings about raising his teenagers, Charles Wheelan chose another tack, and the result is his new travel memoir, “We Came, We Saw, We Left